CCF RESEARCH UPDATE: Hoping for a Valentine’s Day date? Stop waiting to be asked!

University of Texas sociologist Shannon Cavanagh studies online dating and analyzes hundreds of thousands of messages between partners. In a Council on Contemporary Families Research Note, Dr. Cavanagh shares the following observation, just in time for Valentine’s Day:

In the 1950s, dating etiquette decreed that the man had to initiate all interactions. Although much has changed since then, many women continue to believe they will end up with a higher quality man if they don’t appear too eager. You might think the tech savvy women who turn to the internet to search for partners would be less inhibited, but in a recent study using 6 months of online dating data from a midsized Southwestern city (N=8,259 men, 6,274 women), my coauthors and I found that women send 4 times fewer messages than men.

But the payoffs for violating older gender conventions are significant. A woman who initiates a contact is twice as likely to get a favorable response from a potential partner as a man who does so. And women who take the initiative connect with equally desirable partners as women who wait to be asked, without having to wade through a pile of less desirable suitors.

For Further Information

ContactShannon Cavanagh, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 512.471.8319, scavanagh@austin.utexas.edu.

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Miami, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.

The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.